Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T19:09:11.428Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Oil and the Production of Competing Subjectivities in Nigeria: “Platforms of Possibilities” and “Pipelines of Conflict”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2013

Omolade Adunbi
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

This article examines how multinational corporations, recognizing the symbolic value of oil pipelines, flow stations, and platforms as ancestral promises of wealth to subject populations, work with NGOs and communities (sometimes in collaboration with the latter, but sometimes in a more adversarial manner) in setting up governance structures that often compete with, and sometimes oppose, the state in struggles over territorial control and resource extraction. These forms of contestations, it argues, create new sites of power in which NGOs aid multinational oil corporations in negotiating new sites of governance that in themselves create new structures of power.

Résumé:

Résumé:

Cet article examine comment des sociétés multinationales, reconnaissant la valeur symbolique des oléoducs, des stations d'écoulement et des plateformes comme des promesses ancestrales d'enrichissement pour les populations locales, creent des partenariats avec des communes et ONG pour mettre en place des structures de gouvernement qui rivalisent, et parfois s'opposent à l'état, dans les luttes pour le contrôle du territoire et l'extraction des ressources. Ces formes de contestation, selon nous, créent des nouvelles zones de pouvoir dans lesquelles les ONG aident les sociétés multinationales du pétrole à négocier des nouvelles zones de gouvernement, qui en elles-mêmes, créent des nouvelles structures de pouvoir.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , December 2011 , pp. 101 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Alonso, Ana Maria. 2004. “Conforming Disconformity: ‘Mestizaje,’ Hybridity, and the Aesthetics of Mexican Nationalism.” Cultural Anthropology 19 (4): 459–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Apter, Andrew. 2005. The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, Guy. 1977. Modern Nigeria. Thetford, U.K.: Lowe and Brydone.Google Scholar
Barber, Karin. 1982. “Popular Reactions to the Petro-Naira.“ Journal of Modern African Studies 20 (3): 431–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field. Translated by Wacquant, Loïc J. D. and Farage, Samar. Sociological Theory 12 (1):1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bornstein, Erica. 2005. The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality and Economics in Zimbabwe. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Clarke, Kamari M. 2004. Mapping Yorùbá Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Clarke, Kamari M.. 2009. Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Sheridan, Alan. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Stepputat, Finn, eds. 2005. Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hindess, Barry. 2005. “Citizenship and Empire.” In Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, edited by Hansen, Thomas Blom and Stepputat, Finn, 241–56. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Ikime, Obaro. 1980. “The Western Niger Delta and the Hinterland in the Nineteenth Century.” In Groundwork of Nigerian History, edited by Ikime, Obaro, 262–79. Ibadan: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Pauls, Lubeck M., Watts, Michael J., and Lipschutz, Ronnie. 2007. “Convergent Interests: U.S. Energy Security and the ‘Securing’ of Nigerian Democracy.” International Policy Report. Washington, D.C.: Center for International Policy.Google Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. 1978 [1859]. “Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Tucker, Robert, 3–6. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Mbembe, Achille. 2005. “Sovereignty as a Form of Expenditure.” In Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, edited by Hansen, Thomas Blom and Stepputat, Finn, 148–66. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Okonta, Ike. 2008. When Citizens Revolt: Nigerian Elites, Big Oil, and the Ogoni Struggle for Self-Determination. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press.Google Scholar
Renne, P. Elisha. 1995. “Houses, Fertility, and the Nigerian Land Use Act.” Population and Development Review 21 (1): 113–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rabasa, Angel, et al. 2007. Ungoverned Territories: Understanding and Reducing Terrorism Risks. Santa Monica, Calif: RAND Corporation.Google Scholar
Riles, Annelise. 2000. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roitman, Janet. 2004. Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sawyer, Suzana. 2004. Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil and Neoliberalism in Ecuador. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, Michael J. 1992. “The Shock of Modernity: Petroleum, Protest and Fast Capitalism in an Industrializing Society.” In Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent, edited by Pred, Allan and Watts, Michael John, 21–63. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Watts, Michael J.. 2001. “Petro-Violence: Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology of a Mythic Commodity.” In Violent Environments, edited by Peluso, N. and Watts, M., 189–212. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Watts, Michael J.. 2004. “Resource Curse? Governmentality, Oil and Power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria.” Geopolitics 9 (1): 50–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, Michael J.. 2008. “Imperial Oil: The Anatomy of a Nigerian Oil Insurgency.” ERDKUNDE 62 (1): 27–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar